Martha Tedeschi Named New Director of Harvard Art Museums

Martha Tedeschi has been named director of the Harvard Art Museums, succeeding Tom Lentz, who announced his resignation in January 2015, after overseeing an extensive renovation and expansion, and left in June. Since 2012, she’s been deputy director for art and research at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she started as an intern in 1982 and became a full curator in 1999 in the prints department. Her current position was created for her in 2012.

In the Windy City, she oversees a staff of more than two hundred, including the museum’s libraries and archives and its publishing and imaging departments, as well as academic programs and conservation and conservation science departments. She manages eleven curatorial departments and serves as academic liaison to local universities and foundations.

Harvard Art Museums.Photo: Courtesy of Google Maps.

In her new role, Tedeschi will preside over the Harvard Art Museums’ 250,000-piece collections in various media, which come from the Americas, Europe, North Africa, the Mediterranean, and Asia.

Previously three separate institutions—the Fogg, Busch-Reisinger, and Arthur M. Sackler museums—the Harvard Art Museums reopened as a single entity in 2014 after a $250-million redesign and expansion by architect Renzo Piano.